What makes the church at Robertstown quietly arresting is the paper trail attached to it, a sequence of Latin names and legal disputes stretching back to the thirteenth century that reveals a small rural parish bound up in the competing claims of Norman landowners, Augustinian prioresses, and the English crown.

When an Ordnance Survey correspondent recorded the building in 1840, he found walls roughly 14 feet high and 3 feet thick, built of large irregular stones laid with lime and sand mortar, enclosing a space just over 37 feet long and 19 and a half feet wide. The pointed south doorway, cut from limestone and standing 6 feet high by 3 feet wide, was still largely intact on its outer face, though broken inside. A second doorway on the north wall had lost its sides but retained its arches, formed of thin flat stones. The east window had been disfigured, though five brown cut stones survived to hint at its original character. The antiquary Thomas Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, placed the church's foundation with Robert de Guer, who lived between roughly 1201 and 1220, a Norman settler whose name attached itself to the place in various spellings across the following centuries: Capell Roberti Guer in 1291, Capell Robti Gore by 1410. A later Robert Guer, active between 1290 and 1310, kept the name in circulation. Records show that in 1306 the prioress of St Catherine's, known as Old Abbey, failed to present a candidate named Norman fitzRichard to the living, and by 1318 presentation rights had passed to the prioress of St Catherine de Okonyl. By 1584 the associated lands of Ballyrobert had been impropriated to the crown, following the Desmond rebellions.

The church sits in the townland of Robertstown in the parish of Shanid, in north County Limerick. A graveyard surrounds it; the 1840 survey noted it was not much in use at the time, though the enclosure remains. The south doorway is the most legible architectural feature still worth examining closely, and the survival of even a handful of the original east window stones gives some sense of the care that went into the original construction. Visitors with an interest in medieval place-name history will find the shifting spellings of the site's name across the documentary record almost as revealing as the stonework itself.